The shrinking river

As many of you have been hearing from me the rainy season has all but come to an end now out here which in turn means that the water levels are dropping - now I knew this was always going to happen but is incredible to see such a large river dropping by the meter every day. I wake up every morning at the moment and am surprised to see how much further it has dropped.

Hopefully you should get some kind of impression from these images. Thankfully many of the people who had their villages under water have been able to move back now and things are starting to get back to normal for them until the rainy season comes again.

So this is the old French tower on the Mekong riverbank opposite to my home a few weeks ago - you can see the water is flooded up to and over some of the trees and you can see how far back it spreads into the distance....

And here is the French tower today - you can see how much the water has dropped - you can now see the river bank, trees and bottom of the tower along with all the houses that were flooded....

This is a floating house which use to float and the door way was in line with the wall to the left of the picture!

The farmers can now get to the river and wash their cattle everyday which they couldn't do before - they take good care of their cattle over here.

The water level was as hig as the sandbags on the path - the force of the water has eroded a whole section of the bank..

The water level was as high as this wall minus a couple of inches

Before the water dropped all you could see was the red roofs of these houses and tree tops...
By the way the boat isn't sinking - they actually travel like this and just out of sight of the picture is a pumping station that they pull into and have all the water pumped out that they have taken on during their trip..

You could only see the top of the red roof and dome of this pagoda a few weeks ago...

And apparently the river is still dropping. Good news is that they are starting to build the floating bamboo bridge across the Mekong to the island just south of Kampong Cham - so I can't wait to go on it on my bike and upload a blog of pictures....